Jessica Chastain wants to be an action hero — not Batman’s bae or Spiderman’s aunt. Nope, she wants to be the hero herself, running around saving everyone else. What's not to love?

Okay, so the Oscars happened — or, as I've taken to calling them, Hollywood Gets One of Its Ribs Removed So It Can Suck Its Own Dick for Eight Hours: The Movie — and, as you've probably heard, they were very, very dull. Wet paint was bored. String cheese had to go lie down. If you opted to spend your evening watching…

As per lonelygoatherd's request, here's "a porcupine and a bumblebee leaving a movie theater and sharing their opinions of The Help." The porcupine's take sort of lacks nuance, but at least he understands the basic issues at play.

Summer hits are usually action-packed fantasy adventures with superheroes, and with releases like Harry Potter, Transformers and Fast Five, this year was no exception. But The Help has made over $100 million in box office grosses — in less than three weeks.

Some people came away from The Help (book or movie) troubled by its depiction of a difficult era in history, and others defended its perspective. But maybe these camps missed the point, and The Help is really about how good the food made by those underpaid domestics was, including a chocolate pie central to the plot…

Even if you have mixed feelings about The Help, there's a good reason to applaud the film's success. Supposedly, it's confirmed the box office viability of a radical new genre: "Chick flicks" with a bit of substance.

Whatever you think about The Help, at least it's sparked a larger conversation about domestic workers' lives — and maybe even their rights.

Is The Help a heartwarming tale of racial reconciliation or condescending, stereotypical tripe? Let's ask people who have seen the movie, which opens today, or plan to!

Most of the women who showed up for last night's premiere of The Help were a mess.

Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel famously said she would rather get paid $700 a week for playing a maid than $7 for being one, after civil rights groups criticized the portrayal of black characters in Gone With The Wind. Seventy years later, The Help and Viola Davis are enmeshed in a similar controversy.

I've been around for the better part of three decades, and not ONCE has a white person provided me with some sort of salvation. I feel shortchanged. There was no teacher who saw something in me, no employer who defended my rights and no white family who kindly took me into their home. To be fair, I have never…

The 2009 best-selling book The Help — written by Kathryn Stockett — is set in the 1960s and focuses on the relationships between three people: a young white woman, Skeeter, who aspires to be a writer, and two black maids, Aibileen and Minny. According to ABC News, the fictional character Aibileen Clark speaks in…

Allison Janney — aka CJ from West Wing — joins Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Bryce Dallas Howard in the film adaptation of The Help, a story about black maids raising white children in 1960s Mississippi.

[New York, August 26. Image via INF]